Fabrizio De André, the revered Italian singer/songwriter, created a deep and enduring body of work over the course of his career from the 1960s through the 1990s. With these translations I have tried to render his words into an English that reads naturally without straying too far from the Italian. The translations decipher De André's lyrics without trying to preserve rhyme schemes or to make the resulting English lyric work with the melody of the song.

Per De André's comments, "Third Interlude" speaks of love and war, which arise out of two separate human impulses, the desire to give and the instinct to have.

The dust, the blood, the flies, the smells
on the street, among the fields, the people who die . . .
and you, you call it war and don’t know what it is.
And you, you call it war and don’t explain to yourself why.

Autumn in the eyes, summer in the heart,
the desire to give, the instinct to have . . .
and you, you call it war and don’t know what it is.
And you, you call it war and don’t explain to yourself why.

Tutti morimmo a stento, released in 1968, was one of the first concept albums in Italy. In De André's own words, the album "speaks of death, not of bubble gum death with little bones, but of psychological death, moral death, mental death, that a normal person can encounter during his lifetime." After the success of Volume I, De André was provided for this next album a cutting edge recording studio complete with an 80-member orchestra, directed by Gian Piero Reverberi, and a children's chorus. The whole project was under the direction of Gian Piero's brother Gian Franco Reverberi. This album also met with commercial success, becoming the highest selling album in Italy in 1968. In 1969 a version of the album was made with De André re-recording the vocals in English. The album was not officially released.